Sergei Prokofiev, Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke, Duo Gazzana

Prokofiev, Pärt, Schnittke is the fifth ECM album by Duo Gazzana, the Italian sisters Natascia Gazzana (violin) and Raffaella Gazzana (piano). It brings together three composers who worked under Soviet cultural control. At its centre is the First Violin Sonata by Sergei Prokofiev, flanked by shorter pieces that answer it in very different ways.

The sisters have played together since childhood. Their previous ECM album paired Robert Schumann, Edvard Grieg and Tõnu Kõrvits. The French daily Le Monde praised it for reaching "the highest levels of instinctive expression". This programme was recorded in February 2025 at the Historischer Reitstadel in Neumarkt, with Markus Heiland as Tonmeister. Manfred Eicher produced the session and mixed it in September 2025 with engineer Michael Hinreiner. The booklet essay is by Stefano Catucci, who hears in this music "an exercise in resistance and a search for the soul".

Prokofiev began the F minor Sonata op. 80 in 1938 and completed it only in 1946. The duo plays the Allegro brusco hard and percussively, so the third-movement Andante arrives as a brief, tender refuge. The ghostly violin runs of the outer movements keep their chill. His Five Melodies op. 35a, violin versions of songs first written for voice and piano, follow in a looser, more lyrical vein. Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt (1978), an early tintinnabuli piece, sets a slowly growing violin line over a bell-like piano pattern. The programme closes with the Gratulationsrondo by Alfred Schnittke, which borrows the manners of Viennese classicism instead of his usual collage technique. Its good humour does not stay untroubled for long.

In Gramophone (2026) Andrew Mellor heard the Schnittke as "music haunted and perhaps even fatally undermined by its own determination to face up to the aesthetic crisis of the times". For The Arts Fuse, Jonathan Blumhofer praised the vigour of their sonata and called their Pärt "pure and pristine". Critics in Fono Forum, Kulturtipp and Classic Voice agreed, noting how the sisters find the right tone for each composer.

CD, ECM New Series 2854, first released in April 2026, with liner notes in English, German and Italian.